Here is the Canadian Blog Awards 2009 Nominee Badge.

If you are a nominee, feel free to add this badge to your site.

Thanks to Gabriel of Live From Waterloo for making the necessary changes to the badge and Debbie Ridpath Ohi for making the originals.

Round 2 is up for voting.

Round 2 last until December 19, 2009.

Q.

On Sat, 12/5/09
From: [CBA voter]:
Date: Saturday, December 5, 2009, 5:50 PM

Just curious… how does your organization go about finding, then selecting the best Canadian blogs???

It seems to me, like Telefilm Canada, a lot of dregs are selected, and the others which are far more worthy (again like Telefilm Canada) are left out in the cold I’m just curious as to how some of these blogs are selected to be “the best” and by whom?

———————–

A.

The Canadian Blog Awards are a friendly competition among Canadian bloggers and readers, who nominate their favourite Canadian blogs, and then vote for their favourites. The CBA judges simply determine if the nominated blogs qualify for their nominated categories, and we leave it up to voters to determine their favourites.

Quality is not always determined by the voters, but comparative popularity is. My favourite result of the CBAs is looking through who was nominated, to increase my blog reading list and find out what has people buzzing.

Thanks for your question,
Saskboy

———————————–
Another email from a CBA fan:

As we did this year, BlogsCanada.ca will devote a special page next year to the winners of the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards.

As a strictly Canadian publication and aggregator, it it is our pleasure to feature live feeds from the winners and finalists of the awards, and I hope the publicity helps raise awareness of the contest.

Keep up the good work!

Allan W Janssen
BlogsCanada.ca

We have received the polls for the Personal and Overall categories and have put them up for your voting pleasure.

Sorry for the delay in voting. We have been facing a bit of a technical problem.

Since the biggest categories (Overall and Personal) require a customized poll from the polling service, it takes longer than usual to receive those completed polls. We were hoping to receive them by this Sunday, when that didn’t happen, we went for a short delay for the purpose of releasing of all of polls out at once.

However, it is now Tuesday, so what we have decided to do is release all of the other completed polls and get Overall and Personal up as soon as possible.

The schedule has changed as follows:

First Round: December 1 – December 12
Second Round: December 13 – December 19

Sorry for this and thanks for your understanding.

We’ll be shooting to get the voting up on time tonight, but at this moment I can’t confirm that will happen.

As you may know, the Grey Cup game is on today (and I’m a die-hard Riders fan) so I will be glued to the tube. And Northern BC Dipper who has primary access to our voting system forgot when we scheduled the voting start date that he’d be away for a convention this weekend. So it’s looking like voting will be ready early this week instead of today. Thanks for your understanding and patience.

~Saskboy
CBA co-Operator

P.S. Go Riders! /=S=/

The nomination period for 2009 has ended.

Please come back Sunday, November 29th for Round 1 voting.

The nomination period for the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards has begun.

To nominate somebody, go the the “Nominate 2009” page, read the descriptions of the available categories, then click the link at the top of that page to go to the nomination form.

One can send nominations until November 21st.

Another change that those of us that are more politically active have probably noticed is: where are the best conservative, progressive, Non-partisan, and feminist blogs?

They have been removed. The only political category that there is now is the best political blog category itself. Why have we decided to take this step?

The main reason is that we have noticed that some political bloggers from different sides of the political spectrum have not treated the Canadian Blog Awards as a coming together and friendly competition of the Canadian blogosphere, but as an all-out war in which anything that is seen as, well, “serving the other side”, if you will, must be fought by trolling, subverting the nominations process, and negative campaigns. After a few years of trying to come up with a balance fair to all sides of the political spectrum, we have decided that the only fair action is the removal of most of the political categories themselves.

Another reason is that, while looking at other national blog awards, we had noticed that they didn’t have as many political categories as the Canadian Blog Awards did.

However, the Canadian Blog Awards realizes that the political category would not be fun without bloggers of all sides of the political spectrum contesting the second round. What we have done to ensure that is happens is that first of all, we are using a preferential ballot to help avoid vote-splitting, and  second of all we have instituted a new rule which states that for any category that has 30 or over nominees, the second round will consist of the top 10 ranking nominees from the first round.